Testimony of UFT Vice Presidents Janella Hinds and Leo Gordon submitted before the New York City Council Committees on Education and Technology

Our names are Janella Hinds, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Vice President for Academic High Schools, and Leo Gordon, UFT Vice President for Career and Technical High Schools. On behalf of the union’s more than 190,000 members, we would like to thank Technology Committee Chair Jennifer Gutiérrez and Education Committee Chair Rita Joseph for holding today’s public hearing on the role of artificial intelligence, emerging technology and computer instruction in New York City public schools.

Over the past years, we and our union have been deeply involved in conversations and policy development about the role of technology in our schools. One element of this has been continuously updating the professional learning we provide to our members on this topic. During the pandemic, our UFT Teacher Center was crucial to supporting our city’s educators in the transition to remote learning in early 2020 and has continued to make this area of professional learning a priority. We appreciate the Council’s support in providing the Teacher Center with grant funding for the past several years to maintain the accessibility and relevance of this training, including the opportunity to offer over 20,000 hours of free training to city educators on the use of Apple technology to support translation services for our English language learners and other classroom practices. In addition, the American Federation of Teachers provided multiple workshops at its annual conference this summer dealing with the impact of technology on the ways in which we teach and our students learn. At all of these sessions, teachers are grappling not only with the skillsets that they need to successfully teach our students using the latest technology but also the emotional element of fear that some people have about technology potentially taking our work away from us, changing the way that we have been used to teaching or changing the way students experience the world.

All of these elements are being considered as we continue to roll out the agreement in our new contract to provide for a major expansion of virtual learning in New York City public schools. Starting this fall, the Department of Education’s current centrally run pilot program for virtual learning will be expanded, with 25% of high schools eligible to be selected for the program this year and all high schools eligible in the 2027–28 school year. In addition, both high schools and 6–12 schools will be able to offer school-level virtual programs after school and on weekends to students who volunteer to take part. It is important to note that UFT-represented employees can volunteer to apply for this program and that no employee will be required to participate. In addition, teachers who volunteer to participate will maintain their license and therefore tenure. Only if a teacher changes their license (from math to ELA, for example) would they go back on probation, as is true outside the Virtual Learning Program as well.

With all this in mind, we have both been working on the question of how artificial intelligence (AI) will transform the way we teach and our students learn. The fact is, we've been consumers of AI for over 10 years — for example, through the password process in banking and online purchases. The difference now is that rather than being consumers of AI, we and our students are increasingly becoming creators and composers of it. It can be scary when you look behind the curtain at what AI can do, but we have to understand that the process of its integration into our lives has been going on for over a decade — and we have to now teach young people how to utilize it as a tool.

What we have found is that our members are already thinking, "Well, how do I incorporate this into the lessons that I'm going to be teaching? How do we give students the template for successfully using these platforms? How do they question the product that they get out of ChatGPT?” Rather than allowing their students to accept what AI produces as the truth, teachers are working on ensuring that their students know that ChatGPT and similar AI tools often have lots of inaccuracies in what they produce, whether it's in science, math, history or other subjects. Prompting is another skillset necessary in order to do more escalations and experimentation with AI. I have spoken with educators and teachers in the high schools who combine these goals by assigning students projects such as giving ChatGPT a prompt to write poetry in the style of a particular person and then analyzing the product that they've received. New York City educators are developing lessons like these to teach our students to critically think about the way in which they use the tool and what the tool actually produces now, so they can more successfully use it when they go into the world of work.

We can't forget that we're building the skills for the future job market, which is one reason we also have partners like Tech in School. We and these partners have been working with schools around AI for the last couple of years, including doing professional development on how to apply AI technology and how to create tools in the classroom. In terms of Career and Technical education programs, educators are learning how AI affects coding at various levels, including by increasing productivity when coding, introducing cybersecurity implications, and creating access to programming languages that are beyond the average student’s experience. AI is helping them develop and improve their knowledge in an area that goes outside the class.

In terms of next steps, including those called for in the three resolutions introduced last week, we strongly support increased attention to the issues of education technology and call for a thoughtful rollout of efforts to address those issues. We welcome updates to the Computer Science for All initiative to increase access to professional development for educators and administrators, particularly for those in underserved schools, and to increase training for all teachers. We support the development of curriculum around issues of machine learning and generative AI.

You'd be hard-pressed to find any professional learning workshops right now that deal with technology that don't have some kind of AI information, warning or hands-on training. For now, most of these trainings are focused on teachers at a secondary level, including high school and upper-level middle school educators who are thinking about taking it into the classroom in ways that our elementary school colleagues don't necessarily have to grapple with yet. What we’ve heard from elementary school teachers in terms of how to make this content relevant to their work is a need to focus on the nuts and bolts of how to learn — to help students individually do things with the materials that are right in front of them. For middle school, there’s promise in developing a special education tool, intelligent tutoring and the kind of data analysis that happens as the demand for personalized learning increases at this level. For older students, who are moving toward secondary readiness, there is a focus on longer-term critical thinking, work that is more in-depth and projects that require the use of technology — whether it's a Canva presentation, a podcast or a video analysis.

When it comes to adjustments to current policies and the mandating of new professional learning for all educators, however, we recommend moving forward thoughtfully and in full consultation with both educators themselves and experts in these technical fields before making any significant changes or mandating specific types of professional learning. When the conversation about generative AI first happened at the school level last year, there were fears of the implications of this new tool at the system and school levels, and it was immediately shut down by the DOE before being permitted again later in the school year. Currently, there is no AI-specific tool has been certified through the DOE and given full access yet. Most of the commercial AI programs are free tools that schools can access, though some of them are blocked by the DOE. As educators and school leaders are learning more and more about how to utilize this technology, we look forward to collaborating with the Council and with other stakeholders to make sure that these reasonable fears don't outweigh appropriate access to these new and important tools.

For us, we believe appropriate access means starting with older students and making sure the tools we provide access to are developmentally appropriate for this age group, a process that can be phased in over the coming years. We encourage the DOE and Council to look beyond a one-size-fits-all model on this issue. Our schools each have their own technology teams, which ideally work in partnership with their schools’ professional development teams. Both of these groups are thinking about the way to successfully use technology in their schools, and that's going to look different from one school to the next.

Finally, we look forward to continuing to have these important conversations with the Department of Education, because we realize that as technology expands, there are going to be changes in our working conditions as well as in the learning conditions for our students. We want to be at the front of that conversation, and we want to make sure that the voices of teachers who are in classrooms are being heard and respected as we think about how these rapid changes are being implemented in our schools. We want to have conversations to try to dispel some of those feelings of apprehension about AI and to encourage educators to approach these opportunities to improve our students’ education with excitement rather than fear.

Thank you again for today’s hearing. We look forward to our continued engagement throughout the process of developing policies and practices around this issue that work for our educators and students.